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Frenchman Randy de Puniet was still suffering the after-effects of his Misano crash in the wet opening Indianapolis free practices, his wrist injury restricting him to twelfth.

Randy de Puniet was the twelfth quickest participant in Friday´s two wet free practice outings as the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix got underway, the LCR Honda man riding in some discomfort due to the wrist injury he picked up at the last round at Misano.

De Puniet notched his best lap in the 90 minute morning session, as the rain intensified later in the day, going round the new Indianapolis Motor Speedway track just over two seconds slower than pace-setting Anthony West.

Randy de Puniet - twelfth

    `Obviously it is really hard in these conditions. We hoped to get some dry track time to learn the circuit and to test our bike but it´s the same for everybody. We had a good selection of tyres and we just need to find the best choice for us. Our position is not related to our potential but I decided to use this first outing to learn the track. This afternoon, at the end of the session, the track was extremely slippery and I preferred to take it easy. The first part was a real disaster but after that I was able to ride as I would like. The right arm still aches a lot but I did not take any painkillers. If the things get worse I will take some tomorrow for the qualifying session.´

Kawasaki´s John Hopkins was using the same tyre as the MotoGP frontrunners in testing at Misano.

Attempting to replicate the kind of success experienced by MotoGP World Championship top two Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner, John Hopkins was trying out a new Bridgestone front tyre run by the duo as part of his post-race testing workload in Misano.

The Kawasaki rider, like Rossi and Stoner, had plenty of work to do in adapting his machine to the new compound, and as such this aspect occupied much of his day. Hopkins will be hoping that such work pays off at future races, although a lack of testing time means that the immediate introduction of the tyre will not be made to his allocation.


`We had to alter the bike a lot, but we are now the only team using the old type of tyre, basically because we´ve not had any chance to test,´ commented Hopkins, who missed the Brno test and the first Misano practice with a rib injury.

`This new specification tyre is definitely the future for us, but unfortunately it can´t be in my allocation until we´re completely happy with the way the machine handles with it. I´m pleased with the results of today´s test, but still have a lot of catching up to do with the upgraded bike.´

Hopkins also worked on chassis changes to his Ninja ZX-RR, with front end stability a focus for improvement. It was an objective shared by teammate Anthony West, who has been struggling for confidence on corner entry.

`We have some more direction with how we can move forward with the front-end troubles and I felt a lot more confident going into the turns, which resulted in a quicker lap time than we managed in the race. We also tried a different swing-arm, but this didn´t really make any significant difference for us,´ said West.

Hopkins´ fastest time at the test was a 1´35.879, whilst West clocked a 1´36.101.